Aspects of Identity Construction in Post-Soviet Ukraine

After the fall of the USSR, Ukraine entered a quadruple transition period , having to focus in the same time on the construction of a modern state, of a functional market economy, of democracy and of a national identity to support it from the inside, as the core of the civil society. This process has been strongly influenced, at the beginning, by internal factors, such as the lack of consensus between important parts of the population regarding vital topics, like the very desirability of the country’s independence and by external ones, among those, the late recognition of boundaries being of great importance.
A unique vision for the future of Ukraine among the population’s projections cannot be found. Understanding the past is also a disputed subject. Given the missing agreement on these two fundamental topics, question remains if Ukraine should choose to draw its national legitimatizing mythology using a civic-territorial view of the nation or an ethnic-genealogical one .
The Russophile School „emerged in the Tsarist empire and re-emerged in post-Soviet Russia” . It is similar to the Sovietophile School, in what concerns the prioritizing position offered to Russia as a leading Slavic nation, seen as the legitimate continuator of the Kyiv Rus’ to the Russian empire.
The Ukrainophile School is nowadays the main current of thought in Ukraine, after being banned in the early 30s in the USSR. The diaspora has been the keeper of its flame, allowing it to re-emerge in post-Soviet Ukraine.
This diaspora nationalist vector had an important role in the re-emerging Ukrainian nationalism in Ukraine. Since 1991 it has been promoted by the elites and currently occupies the dominant position in the Ukrainian education system, as a part of the state policy of history writing in order to help nation-building.
As Western and Central Ukrainians prefer the centrist-right or centrist-conservative positions of the Tymoshenko or Our Ukraine groups, the Eastern Ukrainians prefer the Eastern Slavic School approach
The Eastern Slavic School defines itself as a reaction to the Ukrainophile School, stressing the importance of objective academic standards in history writing. It promotes itself as an objective truth-seeking school, positioning itself between the Russophile and Ukrainophile traditions, which both claim the exclusive inheritance of the Kyiv Rus’ legacy. Eastern Slavic scholars „see a gradual blurring of the distinctions between Ukrainians and Russians due to a common language, culture, and long periods of mutual history” .
The articulation of identity is mainly a discursive practice and takes place where people can share narratives. Sharing a common code (language) is then necessary so that the same meaning is created by each storyteller and understood by each reader.
the first time. I felt that I had to… how to say it… to be better defined, to be on a certain side.”
The self-identified Ukrainians of Russian origin she met also stress upon the importance of their group of friends when taking this decision. Ukrainian friends provided them with Ukrainian literature, giving them the opportunity to have an insight in the Ukrainian cultural world, erasing the initial rejection.
In Ukraine there are, as we have stated before, some other opinions between these all-Ukrainian and all-Russian positions, allowing the third culture to develop in a silent way, as a result of a negotiated meaning between two cultures that basically assume their Eastern Slavic descent. Occasional clashes between the two extremist blocs can occur, as their opposite Weltanschauungs resent the existence of the other. The territorial model of citizenship could be a conflict solving strategy, a transitory period, until the third culture that young Russians in Lviv and those surzhyk speakers in Ukraine construct.
The Ukrainian Government has to choose now whether it would allow this third way of territorial citizenship and surzhyk using in public to lead the dance. But as external pressure is put by other former Soviet republics that recently began to re-construct their identities, Ukraine might not want to allow its citizens to naturally melt cultural elements of both Ukrainian and Russian cultural heritages in order to create a coherent speech about them. The victory of the Party of Regions in 2010 elections raises the question if this identitary theme would not be left as it is for a while, as long as Ukraine would have now to solve other, more pressing, more concrete, basically economical issues.

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